This new year began with many impressions and as with every spurt of motivation, I decided to create a series out of my mental notes. This time from my PhD courses that I am attending alongside writing a proposal. I have been a student in the academic playground for about 4 years now; all the while hovering around the sand pit while I waited for the swings to get free. This year, I aim to walk towards the swing for a turn anyway. Whether I get it to actually swing or not is secondary, but I aim to walk that intimidating walk. This series is a documentation of those very steps of mine.
Over the past few months of my PhD, I have been reading incessantly, building a research world, by stacking theories, laying concepts and painting ideas that I can then easily call upon my tongue whenever I am asked what I am doing. With every question, I strengthen the foundation of my world. As a researcher in urban practice, I’ve been part of large communities that has built this world together, learning from one another. However, this journey of world building feels a bit more solitary and isolated, because of the structure of a PhD. So, in order to make up for collective creation and continuous dialogue, I am turning to the material world to live amidst good company – within books, articles, essays and papers (the written and the visual word).
While I answer for myself what the future of political ecology is, I may have to start at the very beginning as to why I am interested in building this world within the politics of ecology and why I find it of utmost importance to transgress the very boxes that concepts / research fields confine themselves to. A note of caution – I am in my fourth month of my PhD so I am writing this as a process of figuring out a lot of things for myself.
The primer to all my colourful documentation is my searing disappointment at being introduced to a party of white, European men who’ve created clubs for themselves. For instance, I am trying to understand the concepts of Latour and Foucault in context to my research and their words and standpoints take me further away from considering their theories to build into my world, but moreover, the thought that something can be or should be only either Foucauldian or Latourian is beyond me. From the words of Plato to these texts of Foucault, I refuse to make them the load bearing columns of my research. Following trails of ideas is one thing, and a person, a whole other thing. A directive for myself is if I am to spend my time unraveling thoughts of white old men, I will spend double my time understanding a similar research context through the perspective of womxn, preferably south asian and preferably those less cited or unheard of. I am after all sniffing around ideas to integrate into my world and not create a temple to any one person or perspective.
namratanarendra.com 